Election/Fraud

Voting fraud is hard to measure without a paper trail of votes cast. It is a subject of concern amongst many people,[1] although the commercially-controlled media does not reflect this. Diebold Election Solutions was renamed Premier Election Solutions after leaks of their source code revealed the software could be subject to fraud.[2]

Europe

Integrity Initiative

In 2018, the first Integrity Initiative Leak included a file xCountry.pdf which alphabetically listed the large nation states of Europe, and the US, together with the timing of their next election. Along side most of these countries were a set of people, email address and institutional affiliation. Traditionally, voting systems used paper, and were carried out according to protocols intended to minimize the chance of fraud. In recent years, especially in the US, there has been a push towards more easily defrauded, digital systems.

UK

South Korea

WhoWhatWhy reported in 2017 that "Park benefited from the Korean National Intelligence Service's unlawful rigging of the election in her favor. It hired trolls to set up numerous fake Twitter accounts to create the illusion of widespread public support for Park."[3]

US

“It is more likely that time, rather than the voting booth, will erode the secret power of this Yale group, Nothing this outrageous can survive forever.”Anthony Sutton (2002) [4]

In USA in particular, paper ballots have been either partly or wholly replaced by electronic voting systems, after measures such as the 2001Help America Vote Act.

Since voting machines leave no conventional paper trial, they are open to abuse, which Jonathan Simon claims has happened on multiple occasions.[5] A mound of evidence exists both that many of the voting machines are easily hacked[6], that this is not accidental[7], and that the 2004 US election was decided as a result of fraudulent use of voting technology.[8][9]

Diebold source leaks

In 2003, the source code to all Diebold's voting machines was leaked. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University published a damning critique of the products, based on an analysis of the software. They stated that it would be easy to program a counterfeit voting card to work with the machines and then use it to cast multiple votes inside the voting booth. Another leak of source code occurred in 2006.[10]

Hillary Clinton

In 2016, a recording of Hillary Clinton was published. In 2006 she stated that “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”[11]

Georgia investigation

In an effort to force the state to scrap the electronic voting system, a number of Georgia voters banded together and sued for use of paper votes, but in September 2018 District Court judgeAmy Totenberg ruled that the midterm elections in Georgia must proceed with touchscreen voting machines.[12] The group had asked for an independent security review of the server, expecting to find flaws that would lend weight to their argument for investment in a more modern and secure system. After a Freedom of Information Act request, emails were released in October 2017 that reveal that technicians at the election center deleted the server's data on July 7 – just days after the lawsuit was filed. The Register reported that "That same email also notes that backups of the server data were also deleted more than a month after the initial wipe – just as the lawsuit moved to a federal court. It is unclear who ordered the destruction of the data."[13] A cybersecurity official pointed out “critical vulnerabilities” just a month before the 2016 November election, but the state did not address them.[14]

"Charade" of elections

In April 2016, Ron Paul stated that the American electoral system is rigged to keep "independent thinkers" from succeeding, adding that “I see elections as so much of a charade”.[15]